Tekken series director Katsuhiro Harada has confirmed that Smash Bros creator Masahiro Sakurai is firmly in charge of the design of the next Smash Bros game on Wii U and Nintendo 3DS. Harada says that he’s focussed on developing Tekken Tag Tournament 2 for Wii U, and that the design for Smash Bros will be looked after by Sakurai.
“Although we’ll help provide support on technology and other things involved creating the game, I’m currently very focused on the Tekken series. Some people might say online that I’m going to be involved in the development process or not but that shouldn’t really be an issue because the game design is going to be handled [by] Masahiro Sakurai. So I don’t understand why there would be any worries there.”
“The feedback was very mixed, there were two camps, one said, “Harada, you’re very right, we don’t need the Tekken characters in Smash Bros, good job”. It’s nice that they agree with me but on the other hand, they themselves don’t exactly need Tekken characters in Smash Bros. so it’s kind of complex. Then there’s the other half were people saying, “No, you’re totally wrong, we want Tekken and SoulCalibur characters in the game ,otherwise why does it need to be developed be Namco Bandai?” So there’s really two different sides and it’s difficult to choose one. Obviously I’m not going to say to Sakurai, “We want Tekken characters, please put it in” — that’s not the case, so people don’t have to worry about that. The sole decision will probably be made in a way that if more people want Tekken characters in it then Sakurai might choose to do so, if not then so be it.”
http://mynintendonews.com/2012/07/27/smash-bros-design-is-sakurais-job-not-namcos/
